Illusions Of Control: What Turmoil In Kashmir Reveals About The Anatomy Of An Information Void

Illusions Of Control: What Turmoil In Kashmir Reveals About The Anatomy Of An Information Void

In the weeks since a terror attack killed 25 people, India’s military strikes on Pakistan-administered Kashmir – and Pakistan’s response – have created turmoil across the region. This has disrupted lives and livelihoods, including triggering a wave of operational risks for organizations with supply lines in the area. While perhaps not the most obvious concern, contractions across the information-scape may present the most crucial risk for firms who rely on diverse knowledge channels to protect their supply networks inside info-fragile geographies.

The Jammu-Srinagar National Highway serves as a vital logistics corridor for goods entering and exiting Kashmir – to its east, the route is hugged by sloping cliffs that force it to bend into a series of switchbacks up into the Himalayan foothills towards Udhampur. Land and mudslides often hit the road, brought on by flash floods or heavy rainfall. While many firms rely on periodic updates on the highway’s condition published by local news networks, sourcing is increasingly reliant on community channels: WhatsApp groups, Telegram and posts to X bridge the gap between what has happened and what is reported. But as eruptions of violence cause the internet to shut down across Kashmir, interruptions to these channels leave logistics operators navigating these vulnerabilities from a position of ambiguity. On-the-ground reports are slowed, with incorrect and speculative data moving quickly around the information-scape.

The Jammu-Srinagar route is symptomatic of a larger problem within third party risk management (TPRM) and wider supply chain risk: if the weak link in your real-time risk monitoring can quietly inflate the lag between incident and reporting, then situational awareness can disguise liabilities. In other words, information voids risk inducing illusions of control while compounding risk exposure.

This is a growing problem. During the severe power outages in Texas in early 2021, heavy reliance on energy independence and a lack of hyperlocal reporting obscured the true extent of infrastructure failure. The result was that many logistics and manufacturing firms failed to reroute operations until it was too late – road closures, water outages and state-wide blackouts cost organizations with local supply lines up to $130 billion.

In this sense, information voids are made deadly because they act as sinkholes, quietly eroding under an organization’s risk surface before collapsing in on themselves and cutting off crucial knowledge channels. Rather than being treated as a ‘cost of doing business’, the threat of information voids must push firms to think seriously about their ability to pivot to alternative channels when the lights go out. Organizations looking to build supply chain resilience across info-fragile regions should therefore consider:

• Investment in planning and scheduling optimization (PSO) to improve responsiveness when data become patchy or delayed.
  
  
• Diversification of intelligence feeds. Build parallel information ecosystems – comprised of verified human networks, satellite-based monitoring and regional advisory services – into information feeds.
  
  
• Scenario planning and simulation. Knowledge channels must be regularly stress-tested, in the event they fragment or cease completely.
  
  

Ultimately, the events in Kashmir are one example of a broader truth: if your information landscape vanishes overnight, being left with the illusion of control will likely be catastrophic.